Tag: Nypd

New York City officials are blaming Brookfield Properties, the owner of the park where Occupy Wall Street activists were camped for nearly two months, for thousands of dollars of damage done to books, computers and other property destroyed during the eviction of protesters.

Technical advancements and plunging costs for digital storage mean that government surveillance programs no longer have to be selective about the data they store. And with the average person leaving a trail of Web browsing, emails, text messages and more, there’s plenty of information that can be filed away on individuals.

A 53-year-old apparel designer shot and killed his former boss on a sidewalk outside the Empire State Building in New York City on Friday morning before he was confronted and shot dead by police officers. Nine others were wounded.

In an urgent and informed discussion on race relations spanning America’s early history to the stop-and-frisk policies of the present, author, historian and New York Public Library research director Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad tells Bill Moyers how the nation’s laws were written to control black Americans.

The NYPD this week turned over an audio recording of a call between a confused New Jersey building superintendent and a 911 dispatcher, in which the caller reports discovering an apartment empty except for surveillance equipment. The room turned out to be a safe house for New York police officers spying on New Jersey’s Muslims.

Devices that intercept calls and text messages and dig into data stored on your mobile phone are being marketed to police departments across the United States “as being perfect for covert operations in public order situations.” Or, as the ACLU’s Privacy SOS blog puts it: protests.

Revelations about the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims across the Northeast has prompted eight Americans in a Muslim advocacy group to file a suit demanding the department stop its monitoring and intelligence gathering program. “Democracy Now!” speaks with Glenn Katon (above), the group’s legal adviser.

OWS communications coordinator Shawn Carrié was walking home at 9 p.m. on May Day when nine plainclothes police officers approached him, took his belongings, placed him in handcuffs and put him in a van. He was questioned about his involvement in Occupy Wall Street and then spent the next 13 hours in jail.

Occupiers are accusing New York police officers of beating and neglecting a woman who had a seizure after being handcuffed during the breakup of the movement’s six-month anniversary party in Zuccotti Park on Saturday night.

You didn’t think Anonymous would stand idly by after the arrests of several members of the hacker collective’s extended network, did you? Well, it didn’t. On Friday, news broke that AntiSec, an Anonymous spinoff group, had struck at two companies in retaliation for the LulzSec bust that happened earlier in the week.

New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s involvement in a blatantly anti-Muslim film used to train cadets has leaders of Muslim-American groups calling for his resignation. Debbie Almontaser, who chairs the Muslim Consultative Network, documents some of the NYPD’s acts of aggression against the Muslim community.

Occupiers rang in the New Year on Saturday night with a game of tug-of-war with the NYPD at Zuccotti Park. Instead of rope, however, activists and police officers struggled over the metal barricades that have surrounded the area since late September. Dawn Sunday saw the barriers replaced and the park closed to the public.

Some of the nation’s most prestigious news organizations, including AP and The New York Times, are condemning New York City’s treatment of the media, writing in a letter that “police actions of last week have been more hostile ...” (more)

Neither Brookfield Properties nor the NYPD wants journalists asking questions about an unmarked truck that has been pointing a surveillance camera at protesters in Zuccotti Park for the past few weeks. So much so that a police officer declared journalist Nick Turse’s note-taking at the site to be illegal and ordered him to leave.

The surprising October snowstorm Saturday showed that winter’s chill is fast descending on protesters encamped in New York City’s Liberty Plaza. Will they stay or will they go? We’ll find out in the weeks to come, but for now, Wall Street’s occupiers and their supporters seem determined to keep the movement alive. (more)

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: It’s all about Occupy Wall Street, which Pulitzer Prize winner and guest David Cay Johnston says is unlike any movement he’s covered. Also: voices from Occupy L.A., Nomi Prins, Scott Tucker and the NYPD arrests journalists.

This week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: It’s all about Occupy Wall Street, which Pulitzer Prize winner and guest David Cay Johnston says is unlike any movement he’s covered. Also: voices from Occupy L.A., Nomi Prins, Scott Tucker and the NYPD arrests journalists.

In the battle protesters are waging against U.S. corporations in lower Manhattan, appeals to NYPD officers’ sense of class solidarity have so far failed to shake them from their traditional role. (more)

Top-ranked New York police commanders helped arrest more than 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters Saturday when demonstrators left the sidewalks during a march and tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on the street, blocking traffic.

Thousands of protesters have crowded Wall Street for the last 12 days, decrying the effects of corporate greed on a functioning democracy. Those protesters, Occupy Wall Street, are our Truthdiggers of the Week.

In a reactionary move against technology and the beasts who wield it, the NYPD has announced it wants to jam cell phone frequencies in case of a terrorist attack, citing Mumbai as an example of how mobile phones allowed attackers in that Indian city to micromanage their assault in real time.

Vowing that “this city is going to deal with the blood of Sean Bell,” the Rev. Al Sharpton joined hundreds of New Yorkers in a march through Harlem to protest this week’s acquittal of three police officers involved in the 2006 shooting that claimed the 23-year-old Bell’s life and injured two friends on his wedding day.

The N.Y. Times examines internal police reports in which NYPD commanders discuss their use of “proactive arrests,” covert surveillance and psychological tactics at antiwar rallies in 2002.The country that wages preemptive war now has a city police force making “proactive” arrests.